Wednesday, June 5, 2013

INTERVIEW: Child Actor (Max Heath)

1) Having a name like Child Actor seems to leave you rather ripe for the picking because, well, just look at the movie "Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star" and I'm sure you're going to get a lot of questions about Todd Bridges and how child actors can be like musicians in that some die too soon and are very troubled, while others can go on to have moderate success somehow. Was that all running through your heads when you chose your band name?

I am very suspicious of any musician who doesn't find their band name to be about as meaningless as their own given name. I wish bands had serial numbers instead of names. Well, I guess they practically do!

2) You have a rather unique sound and when I say that it usually means that you're a band I can't easily pigeonhole into one category or simply say "Well, you're a combination of this and this". You have a lot going on in even a single song on "Victory" and at one point one of my notes about the album review was "This is always constant but ever changing; it sounds like everything you've ever heard before and nothing all at once-- how the fuck am I supposed to describe this?" What is the process like going in to make a song? I assume it's a rather lengthy one.

It's kind of hard to explain. Yes, the music is maximalist, definitely packed with a lot of styles and routinely the songs contain over 60 tracks. But spontaneity is also pretty crucial to CA so when I do the production on a song I try to get the bulk of it done within a day or two. That way I feel pretty much 100% excited and inspired throughout the entire process of making the music.

3) You have some scattered male vocals, but are primarily voiced by a female. As a product of the 1980's I feel as if I had very few female vocalists (at least in rock) to look up to growing up, I guess because they were seen more as pop stars and singers and couldn't really be shown playing instruments. Over the last decade I feel like that has changed a lot. Even looking at the number of songs on the radio and instead of hearing the one with female vocals every couple of hours, it's every couple of songs. Do you feel there has been some sort of vast breakthrough in this aspect of music and what do you think helped cause it?

Man this is a really complex question. I never really felt there was a shortage of female vocalists. I feel like women are much more often given the opportunity to sing than to take on other roles in music. I often sense a strange self-congratulatory sentiment of open-mindedness in the "indie" world that I find completely contradictory to what people seem to be comfortable with when it comes to authorship, image and sexuality.

4) Your home towns are both Boston, MA and New Haven, CT. I was technically born in New Haven, though have spent most of my life in this state, which I am currently living in once again. What has happened to the east coast in the last eight years? Before I moved to Texas, there was Just Another Scene and seemingly an endless supply of venues and great local bands. Now it just seems like things have changed so much, but it's so much harder to find bands and venues and shows.

All I'll say is the farther from home we get, the more people seem to like us.

5) You are currently at work on your new album. What are the details on that-- when is it expected to be done, will it be on Fake Four, etc.?

We've written and recorded a bunch of songs. It will be about love and death.